Poem: “The Dangerous Weird”

i am eccentric
        you
              say
because color tastes of
        sound
because history is
        my dwelling place

i was a child with a calligraphy pen
        my mother’s borrowed
              cameos
        a collection of teapots
a girl enchanted
              by amulets
              faerie
              unicorns
        imagined elven revelries
        worlds that exist only in my head

acne-cursed chubby sally-jesse-raphael-bespectacled awkward child
        too smart
too ambitious
        teased and tormented for the dangerous
              weird
        (because idiot child bullies can’t pronounce “eccentric”
        and don’t trust the abnormal)

but i am a forward-thinking girl
        despite the obsession with dusty antiques
adulthood was my ticket to survival
and i
              waited
honed and polished my weird
              shined it up like the best silver serving set
displayed for rare 
souls
  that understood
              (password: “kindred spirit”)

today i find the peculiar ones
those
        grownup off-beat children
        catch them running through the rye
together we make a mountain of
        weird
a paradise of
        strange

to us, the song of color
              the taste of word
              is to be savored
time is neither linear nor measurable
and the world
is
        our playground
eccentrics one and all